Journey of Blippar's CEO Ambarish Mitra

BENGALURU: Blippar CEO Ambarish Mitra's favourite player in the current Indian cricket team is Mahendra Singh Dhoni. But this mere preference has something more to it — both have made it big from small cities, are unconventional in approach and love experimenting and taking risks.

From the lanes of Dhanbad in Bihar to being the CEO of one of world's most-exciting technology startups, Mitra has had a fascinating journey. Blippar started as an augmented reality app, which would allow a user to point the smartphone camera at 'blippable' objects, say a magazine or poster or a pack, and make them come to 'life' on the phone screen.

But recently, the company has ventured into a more ambitious project of becoming 'the Google of visual search'. You can now point the camera at anything — a dog, plant, butterfly and get information on the same. The 'search' currently has the 'intelligence' of a six-year old human. "I was born in Kolkata. But dad used to work in Tata Steel in Dhanbad. I had a fascinating childhood.

At 13, we moved to Delhi. I was never good at studies, failed a couple of classes. At 16, out of that shame, I decided to run away from home," said Mitra. Mitra moved to Munirka (in Delhi) and found two jobs — a helper in a dhaba and door-to-door magazine subscription — to eke a living.

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The dhaba job only guaranteed food, other than daily access to English newspapers. One such newspaper featured an e-business plan invitation. Mitra was always fascinated by the internet, and had a Hotmail id. He applied, and won the event and got $10,000 to put his plan into action.

His wining idea was womensinfoline.com, a web portal aimed at women. He successfully led the company to an IPO in 2000 and then exited. Mitra then moved to England with just "17- days notice". He worked as an internet advisor to the government, then went back to being entrepreneur of what he calls "three large-scale disasters".

"I turned 20 to 30, ten years went by, the promise I created, I was not delivering. I was beginning to look like a one-hit wonder," Mitra said. Suddenly, the eureka moment happened, quite unexpectedly, when he and his CTO Omar Tayeb came up with a £15 bill in a bar.

Mitra placed a £20 bill on the table and joked: 'What if the Queen were to come out and ask for the £5?' Tayeb took it seriously and actually came out with a product. The rest is history. Blippar is valued at around $1.5 billion, according to some reports, and has raised close to $100 million till date.

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Blippar's recent Series-D round of $54 million (around Rs 365-crores) funding was led by the strategic investment fund of the government of Malaysia-Khazanah Nasional Berhad, along with existing investors — Qualcomm, London-based Lansdowne Partners and a well-known billionaire. The five-year-old company, which counts Nissan, Pepsi, Pizza Hut and IPL team Kings XI Punjab as its clients, has huge plans in the knowledge space for India. "When it comes to India, it's not just a market for me, I look at it more personally.

I want to make a difference by delivering our exciting product in the education and knowledge side of things," said Mitra. "I met Rish (Ambarish) in the Silicon Valley in August 2014.

Blippar helps add a layer of information on top of the brand, maybe giving information on nutrition or maybe a game. Since, then Blippar has gone into deep learning by becoming a visual discovery platform. It is aiming to create a new behaviour," said Nandu Nandkishore, retired executive board member at Nestle and visiting faculty at London Business School.